By the time the symposium was over, the consensus among
many of the attendees appeared to be that the kouros was not
at all what it was supposed to be. The Getty, with its lawyers
and scientists and months of painstaking investigation, had
come to one conclusion, and some of the world’s foremost
experts in Greek sculpture — just by looking at the statue and
sensing their own “intuitive repulsion” — had come to another.
Who was right?
For a time it wasn’t clear. The kouros was the kind of thing
that art experts argued about at conferences. But then, bit by
bit, the Getty’s case began to fall apart. The letters the Getty’s
lawyers used to carefully trace the kouros back to the Swiss
physician Lauffenberger, for instance, turned out to be fakes.
One of the letters dated 1952 had a postal code on it that didn’t
exist until twenty years later. Another letter dated
referred to a bank account that wasn’t opened until 1963.
Originally the conclusion of long months of research was that
the Getty kouros was in the style of the Anavyssos kouros. But
that, too, fell into doubt: the closer experts in Greek sculpture
looked at it, the more they began to see it as a puzzling pastiche
of several different styles from several different places and time
periods. The young man’s slender proportions looked a lot like